Roger and Cynthia - Naked in School

by Ndenyal

Chapter 15

On December 30, Kevin and Denise drove up to Camp Lejeune to meet their friends and their families. Tom’s, Ayame’s, and the twins’ parents, together with their children, had spent a very pleasant Christmas together and Tom’s and Ayame’s parents had hit it off, having a number of things in common. Now all the families would meet Kevin and Denise, about whom their children had spoken many times.

Tom’s parents had been happy to get to see the twins’ parents again; they had gotten together a few times in California before Stuart’s reassignment and Mitchell and Stuart enjoyed trading stories about their military experiences; of course they both upheld the traditional rivalry between Marines and Army—arguing about which service was better. And Barbara Emerson, Tom’s mother, was delighted to have a fellow engineer with whom to trade stories since Richard Carter, Ayame’s adoptive father, was an electrical engineer. And Sarah had a wonderful time catching up with her sister Ellen.

Sgt Denison had arranged a celebratory dinner and party for New Year’s Eve at the base club and the entire group assembled. Kevin and Denise had spent the earlier part of the day with their friends so the dinner would be the first time they would meet their friends’ parents. They entered the club and could immediately pick out Stuart as the twins’ father; his red hair was the giveaway.

“‘Evening, sir,” Kevin greeted him as he walked up. “I’m Kevin Coris and this is my girlfriend, Denise Roberts.”

“So pleased to finally meet you, Kevin, Denise,” Stuart answered. “My kids talk about you all the time so it’s nice to finally place the faces with the names. Let me introduce you to the others.”

Ellen was looking at Kevin. “Coris... Coris. Kevin, there’s a foundation based in the Far East by that name. Is there any connection?”

“Oh, yes, that’s my father’s foundation,” Kevin answered. “How’d you know of it?”

“My work,” Ellen responded. “I’m the Japan representative of the U.S.-Japan Association and work with NGOs in the Far East. The Coris Foundation does a little work in Japan.”

“Oh, yes, I remember.... There was a small office in Tokyo when I lived in Japan,” Kevin responded. “I guess it’s still there.”

“It is; do you have anything to do with it? I heard that you were in Korea in the fall—was that about your parents’ foundation?”

“No, it was something else.”

Kevin went on to explain and mentioned his parents’ fate and how the foundation was currently being operated.

“So I don’t have anything to do with it currently, although its director wants me to get more involved after I graduate from college. I do keep in touch, though, and the people I know who work there have been pretty helpful to me in some important projects.”

Cynthia tossed her head. “Yeah, this kid is absolutely incredible, Aunt Ellen. Kevin, it’s safe; all these people are on our side—want to tell them more?”

“Um, Cindy? I don’t like a lot of people knowing...”

“It’s okay, Kevin,” Cynthia said. “These are all close family...”

“If Kevin is uncomfortable, Cindy...” Stuart began.

“It’s okay, sir. It’s only my natural caution. What she’s referring to is how I had the idea for the website about that Naked in School Program business that I got swept up in when I arrived in the States for my high school junior year last year. My foundation contacts helped set up the web server so it would be difficult to find.”

“He means impossible,” Tom put in. “The government, media, and bunches of security companies all tried and none could find it.”

“Yes, and it led to the collapse of the Program, too,” Roger added. “Kevin and Denise did more for exposing the Program’s problems than anyone else.”

“Um, I disagree, Roger,” Kevin argued. “Your own military-style campaign against the Program in high school and Cindy’s legal ideas did more for crippling it so it can’t work now.”

“But most of that success would have been impossible without your website,” Cynthia rejoined.

“Hey, guys, cool it,” Denise grinned as the adults were listening to the byplay, amused. “The twins love using these military metaphors, so let me go for one—so what happened was a two-pronged offense, one directed against the command structure and the other against the operational element, right?”

“Goddamn, that’s brilliant,” Stuart roared in delight. “Denise, wow, you fit right in. Can I adopt you?”

“Sure, sir, your kids feel like my siblings anyway. It’s only been a few months but I’ve come to think like them, I guess,” she answered.

“So how is that anti-Program business working?” Sarah asked. “I remember way back, two years ago when we were in Tokyo and the twins won their judo medals, how we found out that the Program was to start, and how anti-Program they were back then, just at the idea.”

“Well, in our Atlanta high school, Kevin and I started a Program resistance and the twins helped us model it after their own resistance. Then Tom was able to help us get an article about it in the school paper,” Denise said.

“Oh, yes... Tom mentioned that,” Barbara commented.

Denise went on, “But the greatest argument against the Program was Cindy’s study where it showed the bad effect on student performance.”

“Roger and Tom were involved in that too, Denise,” Cynthia put in. “And Tom’s group has an article coming out that shows the damaging social effects that the Program has on society. That’s coming out in a few months.”

“Well, and damaging for the children, too—I can’t help thinking of what happened to Ayame and how Roger and Tom saved her last year,” Ellen said as Richard nodded in agreement. “I simply cannot imagine a government operation that would allow kidnaping and brainwashing of children like they were doing.”

“Yes, and how the Program offices were taken over by a criminal gang—one would think that this could only happen in fiction, but here it actually happened,” Sarah said. “And Cindy told me that you, Kevin, discovered that—just amazing!”

“Kevin got the Medal of Freedom from the president for that,” Denise offered.

“She’s being modest too,” Kevin smiled. “President Gerston gave Denise the Presidential Citizens Medal for her work, as well.”

“Well, it seems that our children are models for public service achievement,” Stuart said. “Already they’ve done more than most people do in a lifetime.” He raised his glass. “Let’s have a toast to the further success of the kids and to the complete demise of the Program.”

“Hear, hear,” was the reply.

“Say, Dad,” Cynthia said after everyone had sipped their drinks. “What about the Program at the high school here? Did you do anything about it?”

“Ha,” Stuart answered. “Our high school is on the base and it’s actually run by the DoD. So I’ll give you one guess about the Program.”

“Nada, zip, zilch. That’s three guesses. Any of them correct?” she grinned.

“Yep. Seems the question of running the Program here never even came up... I heard that it was never considered at all—the materials that were mailed to the school from the Program agency were recycled without even being opened and people from the regional Program office were turned away at the gate. That’s what I was told. There’s a tough dress policy at the base schools, too. The policy says something about its promoting a safe, positive learning environment and keeping standards of health and decency. We know just how well the Program does that.”

“I wish our old school were like that,” Roger said. “Life would have been so much easier...”

“Don’t say that—I wouldn’t have known how wonderful Tom was if the Program hadn’t thrown us together, even though it did it indirectly,” Cynthia objected.

“There is that... well, I guess it’s one of those clouds and silver linings things,” Roger admitted.

Gradually the conversation turned away from Program matters to talk about some of their future plans. Tom’s parents were fairly certain that they’d accept the jobs at the nearby nuclear power plant.

“What does your daughter think?” Sarah asked. “She’s in college in San Diego, right?”

“She told us to go for it,” Barbara answered. “She’s got a serious love interest there now; he’s graduating in May and is staying in the area to study law.”

“They all grow up,” Ellen said. “Look at my daughter. When I sent her with you last year, Sarah, she seemed to be a little girl still. Now she’s truly a young woman. And Richard is close to when he can retire, too. He can get a pension from his company; we can move to the States, and he’s still young enough to do some private consulting—maybe helping Japanese companies work with their U.S. suppliers and markets.”

“It would be wonderful to have you closer to us, Ellen,” Sarah commented.

After dinner grew to a close, the group left the restaurant and went to the club where the New Year’s celebration would continue with entertainment and dancing into the night.


When Kevin and Denise returned to school after the holidays, instead of the Monday morning announcement of the names of the students to participate in the Program, their teacher gave a handout to everyone and told them that it described the revised Program.

Participation was now optional; students were encouraged to volunteer. If they did, their participation would count for one term of gym. The only touching of participants was to be what the person allowed. Students could be used as classroom models if they consented and no coercion by teachers was permitted.

Kevin stared at the sheet and then looked at Denise with a baffled expression.

“Huh,” he said. “What’s the point? Why are they bothering; all this does is it makes the school into a clothing-optional facility. Can something like this have any educational benefit at all?”

“Beats me,” Denise answered. “Roger and the others will be interested to hear about this, I think.”

Meanwhile, Roger and Cynthia were getting their own surprise. They were in an education course called “Modern Education Principles.” The course ran for the full academic year, fall and spring. At their first post-holiday class meeting, the same day that Kevin and Denise were learning about the way the Program had changed, their professor was describing the projects that the class would be doing for the rest of the year.

“These projects, there are six of them, all are in the category of ‘Issues in Modern Education.’ Some have to do with curriculum and some with classroom practices. Three are at middle-school level and three deal with high-school issues. The projects will require you to work in teams of five to six students and your projects will be randomly assigned. However, you may choose who you want to work with on your team. Each of these project issues concerns a current problem in contemporary education practice; you will develop a proposal and write it up in publication format and submit it to me. After I critique it, you will make a presentation of your project to the entire class, and then take it to your assigned cooperating high school or middle school and you’ll have five class sessions to implement your project. Take a few minutes now to choose your team members.”

Cynthia formed her group and in addition to Roger, two of its members were their friends who had worked on the Program report the previous year, Rhonda and Alan.

“All right, are your groups ready and none is larger then six? Okay. One member from each group, please come here and take one of the envelopes out of the box on the table. Then return to your group; when you’re back, open the envelope. The sheet shows the project you’ve selected and on the index card, please write the names of your group members and give the cards to me.”

Cynthia’s group opened the envelope and read the sheet. It read, “Issue: The Naked in School Program fails to meet its stated educational objectives. Design a curriculum for at least three classes, corresponding class objectives, and classroom procedures to better align the Program with its stated objectives. Then demonstrate how your solution would work in class sessions at Merritt High School.”

Cynthia stared at the sheet openmouthed. Then she looked up and raised her hand.

“Dr Miller, this project has to do with the Naked in School Program, but the Program is all but gone in high schools now. I don’t even know if any objectives even exist anymore, since it seems that each school is doing what it wants. Is the Program even an education issue anymore?”

“Oh, yes, the Program is changing, isn’t it?” he answered. “Those projects were designed last fall before all of the changes to the Program began happening. Well, the curriculum committee has designed the projects; we’ve arranged with the schools to allow them to accommodate these project sessions, and there isn’t another issue to replace it. Use the objectives as they were before the changes were made.”

“But, sir, would that be valid?” Roger commented. “We wouldn’t be solving a current issue, right? It looks like the Program will be gone from schools within a year if things continue as they’ve been going, Oh, another thing—our demonstration of the project to this class. Where the Program is concerned, wouldn’t that need to have nudity? We’re not going to be demonstrating anything that requires nudity, just so you know.”

Miller gave him a hard look. “I expect that these projects, all of them, to be a fully realistic implementation of your team’s project solution when you demonstrate them in their actual classroom settings. Do what you need to do to make certain that your classroom solutions fully meet the objectives of this exercise,” he replied. “Take five minutes to arrange when your group will begin meeting to work on your project. Then we’ll need to get back to our class material.”

Roger turned to the others. “Well, this is crap. We’re not into the nudity, right? How about we start with the old objectives and put a twist on it for the new legalities...”

Cynthia interrupted, “Hey, have an idea; this may work out. It probably isn’t as bad as it seems. Let’s arrange some times we can all meet, okay? Then I’ll explain what I have in mind, but bring your own ideas too.”

Cynthia and Roger’s group met later in the Education Library to discuss their project.

“I’ve got the germ of an idea but I need to get it into some rational form,” Cynthia began. “Anybody have your own thoughts?”

“What are the local schools doing now?” Rhonda asked. “Parkside is still doing their student popularity games, I heard, but a friend of mine who’s observing classes there told me that most of the kids who were willing to do stuff have already been through the Program and new kids aren’t volunteering as much now.”

“And at Merritt there’s just about no one doing the Program; it’s optional,” Roger offered. “Anyone hear about the other local schools?”

“My sister’s a soph in North High,” Alan put in. “It’s got a lot of kids from the Air Force base there who’ve refused to be in the Program. She said it’s basically defunct in her school now.”

Jesse, another member of the group, made a suggestion. “Look at that anti-Program website and see if people have been writing about their schools.”

“Good idea,” Roger said. “Let’s look.”

They found dozens of reports about the fate of the Program at many schools on the website; some told about how their schools were desperately attempting to keep the old Program operating but failing while others spoke about how their schools had eliminated it.

“This is really a dead issue, I think,” Roger said. “I get the feeling that Miller won’t back down, though, so looks like we’ll have to work with what we’ve got. The old, original Program objectives. Where can we find them, anyway? The original federal Program website was taken down when the Department of Education took over the Program.”

“How about my asking at the service desk?” Rhonda suggested. “They know about how to find all kinds of things.”

She came back with a folder and showed it to the group.

“Look, they gave me copies of Program rules booklets from a bunch of high schools in the area,” Rhonda explained. “They were planning to scan them to put on line but with the Program in such flux, doing that’s now a low priority. Anyway, see, these all give the same basic objective, let me read, it’s to ‘become more comfortable with your body and your sexuality, to treat others in natural balance as both individual people and sexual beings, to learn to harness your natural energies, and to behave in a more mature and morally conscious manner.’ It goes on to say that the result is that the student’s ‘sexual tensions will be diminished.’ How can we use that crap? That’s not a true educational objective. More of a statement of principles, right?”

“Not objectives as they taught us, anyway,” Cynthia agreed. “But it’s what we’ve got. So the way we need to work is to use those principles, let’s see how to generalize them, comfort with self, treatment of others, learning a skill, and a standard of behavior. Four elements. None of them mentions or even implies nudity—public nudity, anyway. So for our project, we’ll do a frontal attack on the nudity part by designing a curriculum that addresses those four elements and see whether the nudity requirement of the Program is even necessary. Make sense?”

“Then we need to use them to build classes around—three classes?” Jesse asked.

“Yeah, I guess we’ll need to figure out which classes to use—ones that the Program elements apply to, I suppose,” Alan agreed.

Cynthia summarized then, “So we take those four elements and use them to construct curricula for classes. We’ll need to decide which typical high-school classes will work for our purposes.”

Soon they had a working plan developed and the meeting ended soon after that. During the next few meetings, the group members wrestled with the problem of trying to determine, for a social curriculum which was disappearing from all of the country’s high schools, what kinds of instructional materials and procedures were appropriate for the three classes that they were going to model. Their appeal to the instructor to assign another topic was to no avail; college professors are notoriously inflexible once their courses have been developed. Their group found an easy solution, however. They would simply return to how the courses were taught pre-Program!

The group had chosen three courses: psychology, biology, and health. For the biology class, the “comfortable with body” part would be applicable and would use realistic mannequins of both genders to demonstrate human anatomy. Health included sexual education, so that class would be taught using the standard videos and models that were used in pre-Program years.

Psychology was the most interesting class to redesign, as it encompassed sexuality, relationships with others, controlling one’s emotions, and experiencing mature and moral behavior.

“Actually my idea here also is related to sex ed as well as psych,” Cynthia remarked at one meeting. “The biggest failing of the Program curriculum is the fact that it forces a participant to be naked among a large population of clothed people. This singles out that person, it objectifies him or her. Unless there’s a culture of respect, where people’s individual rights are honored, some kids would want to take advantage of the situation and abuse the naked kid. And that’s what happened in the Program, as we found in the studies we made from that website’s forum posts.”

Rhonda was nodding. “If we take that second so-called objective of, let’s see how it’s worded, ‘treat others in natural balance as both individual people and sexual beings,’ it’s the ‘treating others’ part that’s a key to achieving that goal, right? We need to think of how to incorporate the regard for others in how our classes work.”

“Cindy and I had a real-life demo of something like that, actually,” Roger mused. “We escaped having to do the Program in our school, you heard about how we did that. But you guys know our friend Tom—he worked on that anti-Program ed project last spring. He also introduced us to social nudism. The difference between how nudity works in the Program and in nudism as a social lifestyle is huge. The obvious difference is that everyone is nude, but if someone isn’t, like a newcomer, it’s no big deal.

“Also, the amount of respect people show for each other, even among people who’ve never met before, is amazing. So in a nudist environment, everyone’s on equal footing—in terms of clothes, anyway, and no one stands out. It’s being different that causes the problems that the Program kids have. I learned in my psych class that among most animal species, the individual who stands out as being different from the group tends to become an outcast or even gets attacked; humans tend to have the same reaction. I think it’s really difficult to treat other people—the words are ‘in natural balance’—in a balanced way if they are really different, and being the only nude person among clothed people is an extremely unbalanced situation,” he concluded.

“So we need to get back to these classes,” Cynthia continued. “We need to bring back balance and equality among the students in the classes we’re designing. The other piece is respect, that’s respect for the person as an individual and as a member of the group. We took this class in tantric massage which taught all about how to give one’s partner total attention, we saw that the greatest strengths in relationships are built when others are treated with respect, when their own feelings are put before your own. In the Program, kids are thrown together without their having any chance to build a culture of mutual respect. How about this? Perhaps a class in tantric massage should be a high school requirement? Wow, what a thought! Hmmm, maybe we could use the model of tantra to demonstrate the care and respect that the art is designed to develop between two people.”

“Sure, why not do that?” Jesse asked. “As part of our psych class. Maybe, for students in a committed relationship, they could watch a video on tantric massage, and even do it? You’re all grinning at me. I don’t mean nude, like while wearing a swim suit or something. Even students who’re too shy or otherwise hesitant to work that closely with a partner could simply view the videos and learn about relationships by watching how caring partners treat each other.”

Alan was nodding his head vigorously. “Yeah, Cindy, I think you’re onto something there...”

Cynthia raised her hand. “Hey guys, it to me that the psych class—no, actually maybe the health one for first-term frosh—should have a major part where they learn about forming trusting relationships between people. I think that having the kids do some kind of massage with others in the class, even over their clothing, and learn what it feels like to make another person relaxed and at ease, would be a great idea. That would work to fulfill all of the objectives, wouldn’t it?”

“Great idea, Cindy,” Alan said. “So we should model a frosh health class then?”

“Let’s consider that,” Roger said. “So we’ve kinda agreed that the nudity part of the Program is the greatest barrier to achieving interpersonal respect; it destroys the ability to achieve the, I quote, ‘natural balance as both individual people and sexual beings’ that the Program was designed to do but it’s had the opposite effect of what the so-called experts thought the nudity would do. Seems to me, though, that they were correct in one respect, and that’s that contact between two people—touch—is the most powerful builder of relationships. Cindy will kill me because I always go to Marine metaphors—hey, Cyn, don’t make faces at me ‘cause you know that you do it too. In the combat obstacles courses and in other combat training, even in hand-to-hand combat, I’ve seen how the men come to care for each other stronger than brothers. The men are always in close physical contact and the trust it builds is enormous. There are plenty of stories of how some have even died to protect their comrades. It looks like Jesse and Alan like Cindy’s idea of trying to use personal touching in helping kids build relationships. We need to figure out how that would really work in a class. Let’s see how we can put those ideas into these classes.”


Copyright © 2015 Seems Ndenyal. All Rights Reserved.